Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday January 02, 2010 @10:35AM
from the this-gentleman-clearly-grasps-his-subject-matter dept.

joeflies writes "CNN published an article entitled 'Digital Piracy Hits the e-Book Industry.' It quotes the following statement by novelist Sherman Alexie: 'With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away. It terrifies me.'"
The article also points out a couple of interesting statistics for a "slumping" industry beset by piracy: "Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers," and "consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."

(CNNNN) -- When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, printed paperback copies of the novel were found in library sites such as the New Your public library. Within days, it had been read for free more than 100,000 times.

Library loans, long confined to books, are spreading to music and movies. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

"It's fair to say that loaning of books is exploding," said Dilbert Drongo, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for library books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more libraries. But library loans may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.

"Libraries are a serious issue for publishers," said Carnt Hakkit Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular "Twilight" teen-vampire series says it "considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance."

Authors are concerned as well.

"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely lendable, how easy it's going to be to loan them," said novelist and poet Sherman Dyslexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.

"Textbooks are frequently loaned, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of dubious policy at AAP. "We see shelving of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Lending of music, thanks to cassette, CDs and other devices, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat library loaning, from shutting down free publicity to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual customers.

Although legal lending of music persists, Apple's online iTunes store is now the world's biggest seller of music.

To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat libraries, and you'll get a wide range of opinions.

Some publishers may try to minimize lending by delaying releases of books for several weeks after digital copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Snorkel King's novel, "Under the Aquadome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off physical book technology altogether. J.K. Pot has thus far refused to make any of her Hairy Porter books available physically because of library fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in pixels.

However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from libraries may be overstated.

The disdain of publishers for libraries is well known. It's been well known that the recording industry and movie studios have been trying to prevent libraries from lending their works. The book and magazine publishers would love to go to a "pay per read" model. A library only buys a book once and lets as many people read it as want to. That's clearly theft of copyrighted material. The idea that you can go read a 3 year old copy of "People" in your dentists office without paying for it amounts to communism.

It is worse than that -- the person in question doesn't even know what is happening in his own profession. From TFA,

"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King..."

Stephen King has already released a no-DRM ebook and made a lot of money from it, by releasing it piece by piece and requiring a certain minimum number of paid downloads before the next part of the story is released; this was discontinued because King himself could not figure out where to take the story. Perhaps if these people spent less time whining about how their fans are not paying their publishers, they could be more aware of how the Internet can change things and how they can use computers to publish their stories in new ways, connect with their fans, and provide their books to more people.

I think he clearly understands it quite well, or at least its sociological effect. The concept of "artistic ownership" is an unfortunate consequence of an economic system that commidifies everything, even ideas. Open source represents something outside of capitalist production, producing for use value [wikipedia.org] instead of exchange value [wikipedia.org].

Open source culture has indeed spread the idea that ideas shouldn't be treated like property, and should be proud that it demonstrates an alternative.

There are a lot of code writers. A lot of bloggers. A lot of people who may remix music. Yeah, there aren't many people painting paintings here, but theres a lot of people with pretty good Photoshop skills. Yeah, Stephanie Meyer might not have a Slashdot account, but I guarantee you that the average/.er ends up writing as much as she does in blogs, comments, etc. Yeah, we might not have many people from bands, but we do have remixers, those who do parodies and a pretty high percentage of music fans.

What makes you say that people aren't willing to pay for books, music and films?

Yes, e-books are gaining popularity now that the technology is becoming more portable and easier. This just means that it is easier for some/most people than carrying around/keeping shelves worth of books (compare how much space a season of TV takes up when comparing VHS and DVD).

Yes, because it is digital it is easier to copy. But what about the people scanning print books to create digital versions of them (legitimately for out of copyright works on sites like guttenberg, or illegally)?

Pirates will be pirates.

You say how do people make their money, but lets think about this...
* 2009 is the first time that films in cinemas have grossed over $10 billion!
* 2008's The Dark Knight made over $500 million in the US and over $1 billion worldwide. [1]
* Avatar has the second biggest opening week performance, below The Dark Knight, and is well set to becoming the 5th film to earn over $1 billion worldwide (Titanic [1997], Lord of * the Rings: Return of the King [2003], Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest [2006], The Dark Knight [2008]) -- all when piracy is supposed to be killing the movie industry. [1]
* Then there are runaway indie hits like Paranormal Activity ($107 miilion for a $15 thousand budget!) [3]

For music and books, i don't know what the figures are, but:
* Nine Inch Nails released an album for $4 or $5 (with limited edition versions for a lot more that sold out very quickly) and as a thank you released an album for free under the creative commons license, giving you permission to rework and remix it how you want
* Sandie Thom's career was launched via a webcast
* Various artists (such as Helen Austen, Poko Lambro and Lizzie Hibbert) are using YouTube and MySpace to help promote themselves as well as performing in pubs and bars, allowing them to gain a wider fan base
* The internet and the digital age are helping authors and musicians reach a wider audience (I like a lot of German music artists) -- especially new and upcoming authors and artists (I read quite a bit of internet fiction and buy some of their work where possible as a thank you)
* Self-publishing sites such as lulu.com are helping would-be authors publish their own work

The digital book formats are helping would-be authors publish their own works.

As for advertising, why would I want to have that take up space on a website I am viewing, be forced to watch it on the DVDs I own or have to be interrupted while watching a TV program or film with annoying adverts (Sheila's Wheels, anyone!). If the solution is to put advertising in the middle of electronic books for any of the new books from major publishers, then count me out (same with DRM).

And before you ask, I buy CDs, DVDs and books (but will be buying more electronic books in the future).

I'm talking about people who write books, write or make music, movies, etc. If you have a family or want a life or good health you can't spend your time on the road touring nor can you afford to spend all your free time producing content for which you earn little income.

You are ignoring the basic fact that most people who write books and write or make music don't make a living doing it. I know a lot of people who do that. The same is becoming true of movies. We all know examples in music, so I won't relate them. I'm sure we all have co-workers who are part time musicians.

An example from book publishing, I once met an author who was in the process of getting her fourth SF/Fantasy novel published. I had noticed a couple of her previous book while browsing at Barnes and Noble. When I met her she was working as a part time secretary for a professor. None of her novels had resulted in what could be considered a full time salary for any length of time. Yet her publisher was still publishing them, and she was still writing them.

I have a friend who spent a significant part of his net worth making a movie and trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get it shown at major film festivals.

I have a friend who paints, and tries to sell his paintings online, for about $2500 a piece. He maybe sells one a year.

So stop with the "I've gotta make a living at writing/making music/making movies" crap. Most of the people who write/make music/make movies would do it even if there weren't going to be a big paycheck, because most of them don't get a big paycheck anyway. Even with established artists (with rare exceptions) once the publisher has their cut, there's never much left for the artist.

Your logic escapes me. I understand technology very well and I understand his concern. Piracy is much easier and cheaper in a digital world than in a print world. It is a threat to the business of content creators (authors) and their publishers. Ads won't pay the bills. All the clowns on this site who think people should or can work for free or a pittance need to get of their mommas' basements and try to support a family.

Aren't those clowns called authors? Not every author has best-seller credentials backing their latest project. And, consequently, there are some seriously lean times ahead of any new author - even some established authors. Yet we still have authors writing despite the uncertain economics of it all.

How much of a threat "piracy" represents is very much up to debate. But clearly the quoted author has no concept of the technology - right down to naming "open-source". They're full of fear for a mystery that

Maybe if the consumer didn't feel ripped off, exploited, and raped by every business and company they have to deal with we'd be more receptive and less possessive of whatever goods we happen to come across. Half the damn stuff in my house I don't really own, I license or lease or rent it or whatever. Damn right I like the idea of open source and control.

"Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence."

Except that will not happen. Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases. Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete. The "publishing industry" may come to mean systems that automate this process, perhaps even online communities where readers not only pay authors but also communicate with the authors and with each other, commenting about the stories and characters.

Of course, that is not the picture that the current publishing industry wishes to paint, since it means the demise of their current business model and way of life. They will tell us that unless they continue to yield growing profits, authors will not write anything and we will be left without great novels to read, textbooks to study, or any number of other printed media.

"But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?"

Educate new authors about direct compensation, discuss what Stephen King tried, and start building those direct compensation systems and online communities for authors and their fans. Such communities already exist for illegal books, missing only the payment component, so I think it is fair to assume that a community for legal books, complete with a payment system, would be successful. All that is needed is for a few great authors to try it out, to release good stories that people will pay to have revealed, and new authors will start trying it for themselves. We already have the technology necessary to start building such communities, it just has not been combined into a coherent system yet.

However, his royalties may. Sooner or later we will have to consider, as a culture, what to do if established authors, and promising young authors, decide to abandon writing because too many freeloaders reduce author profits below subsistence. I'm not talking about the **AAs, I'm talking about individual authors who may have contracts with reputable publishing houses that do not insist on exploitive relationships. And what about the psychological deterrent to creativity? JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in desperation on welfare. Might she have done so if she believed her work would be distributed freely without any compensation to her?

The writers need to adapt. Back in the 1800s, hugely successful authors like Charles Dickens used serials to captivate audiences. Each person needed to buy each issue of the magazine to continue reading the story, and later it would be published in a book if it was a success. Today, that is relatively rare in traditional publishing, though it does still happen with manga.

Perhaps established writers can do what Stephen King did when he distributed an e-book, he would release a new part after certain sales were met. Or perhaps they can sell chapters to put on various profitable blogs. Perhaps they can release things in blogs themselves.

For every story about an author not making enough money on a book, there are ten more examples to counteract it. The creator of XKCD survives only on XKCD merchandise. And XKCD is marketed exclusively to open source culture. The comic itself isn't updated daily, and theres no ads on the page. Sounds like a recipe for failure right? No, because people liked it, it survived. Surely then the tale of Homestar Runner would be one that ends in failure as they are all hard-to-do Flash animations with lots of bandwidth, yet the creators still make a living, still make new cartoons and recently released several video games based on it. All this while no ads on the page. There are many other sites that make a living for the author, User Friendly, CTRL+ALT+DEL, MegaTokyo, and Penny Arcade and more all make a living for their authors.

Do we want promising youths to avoid careers in writing because online distribution has hurt profitability? Would J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Norman Mailer have enriched our lives if they needed other jobs? And Robert Heinlein said that many of his stories were written "to buy groceries".

Promising youths are not going to avoid careers in writing because now publishing is free. Look at teenage blogs sometime and you will see more poetry than in an English class, stories, etc. If they write something and the community likes it, the community will sustain it.

Without some requirement to pay for books, would enough people do so?

There is always going to be a market for physical books. Now, 10 years from now, 100 years from now. Its not going anywhere. And those are physical things and can't be duplicated for free.

Since a large part of the US's trade brings our nation income from royalties on Hollywood movies, is it possible we need to make sure what we produce has value in the world market to improve our balance of trade and thereby reduce inflation and unemployment? Of course the answer is yes-- so maybe the question we should be asking is how to puncture the evil media conglomerates (like the **AAs) to make sure the wealth from our nation's creative minds does not unduly concentrate wealth and power.

You are just like the RIAA. You see a -possible- reduction in sales, ignore history and ignore people who don't fit your definition and make a flawed conclusion. A) Before there was any copyright people wrote B) Today, people can release content for free, without ads and still make a living C) E-Books and online publishing increase the amount of writers because it costs no money to get them published and you keep your rights.

But what about the harm to books and to the confidence of new authors happening RIGHT NOW.... what do we do BEFORE we have a system of direct compensation in place?

Oh, Cry me a river. Really - if 80% of all the authors producing today simply stopped, would anyone notice? This hugely precious literary ecosystem you seem to speak of doesn't and has never existed - it's a figment of a money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry.

Ever been in the fiction section of a bookshop in the last 75 years? Almost all of what's on the shelves is deriviative garbage published by a miniscule number of gatekeepers desperate to reproduce the last blockbuster than sold more than 10,000. JK Rowling?? Without too much subjectivity, JK Rowlings books are complete shit! Fiction publication is like music publication: for every vapid block-buster there are literally thousands of similar works (some arguably far better) that barely sell much over a couple of thousand copies in their entire print runs despite ridiculous marketing efforts.

Meanwhile, really worthwhile books will always get written because the energies of art and intellectual freedom will always far outweigh trivial economic consideration. For one thing, what do you think authors did before the perpetual copyright we have today? Do nobody bother to write books before 1850?

The time is ripe for change. Piracy will decimate the money-grubbing, Disneyfied publishing industry and not a moment too soon. Don't fancy making tuppence from your pipsqueak idea for a murder mystery? Get a proper job!

What exactly is a "proper" job? One where you go to work every day for minimum wage, doing the same thing over and over and over, hating the job and the paltry contents of the pay envelope at the end of the week? Do you have a "proper" job that doesn't involve a money-grubbing corporation of some sort and isn't solely in the pursuit of money?

And to play devil's advocate for a moment, what if everyone listened to your advice? Everyone gets a

That's a strawman, and you know it. Yes, you can sell open source software, but only an idiot buys it without some kind of added value (like technical support). What kind of added value can an author of an ebook offer that would compel someone to buy it? None.

Simple fact is, the open source model doesn't apply to other creative works because there isn't the opportunity for side revenue.

Ummm.. How exactly do I as the author of a book make money by allowing you to write fan fiction and freely copy my work?

First of all, "copying of your work" is not involved here; fanfic writers build on top of it. So your nice story about adventures of Lagrumar and Meleanne (who, of course, got accidentally teleported onto a planet of robots) will not be touched - you wrote it, and nobody can change what you wrote.

Now consider your protagonists and the universe that you developed. As a businessman you

Clearly people pirate books they wouldn't have bought... I know one kid who has like 4000 ebooks, he's probably read two of. Also, making them "more" digitized doesn't matter. When there's one digital copy, there's 10,000,000. They are right about one thing, making them easier to buy (and part of easier means less copy protection) will mean they will sell more.

Just look how iTunes completely stopped selling anything when they started offering non-copy-protected books - oh wait, they didn't.

The books I respect I buy in hard cover, largely Pratchett and reference books The ones that will enjoy and read casually I want to carry around I buy in paperback. If they really wanted to promote sales they would include an electronic copy with the purchase. I don't pirate (really) so there are very few that I have in electronic form. The ones I have are very largely from Tor. The ones that I really enjoy I will buy in paperback or hard copy. Tor publishers have effectively proved that giving books away get them more sales. Many times I have read a book provided online and then bought the entire series in paperback or hardcover.

When I want a particular book then I check for availability of an eBook copy first. No book I have wanted has ever been available in eBook format. Something tells me that I'm not in the eBook target market -- I wonder how many open source proponents are?

The books I respect I buy in hard cover, largely Pratchett and reference books The ones that will enjoy and read casually I want to carry around I buy in paperback. If they really wanted to promote sales they would include an electronic copy with the purchase.

As an example of this, last time I bought a hardbound Honor Harrington novel, a CD was included with electronic copies of ALL the Honor Harrington books. Very nice, wish more publishers than Baen would do that.

Baen's been smart about avoiding e-copy paranoia for a long time now. You can even browse some of the backlist online for free. Great folks; I'm always glad to do business with them.

You can download the Free Library for free. In whatever format you like, ePub, Mobi, HTML, Kindle, etc. I've got about half of it in my Sony Reader now. Plus the couple hundred dollars worth of stuff I've bought from Baen at about $6 per eBook....

So it's ok to steal, as long as you steal more than you could possibly have bought legitimately otherwise? Sounds great. I guess you'll have no problems then with me pirating millions of dollars worth of money. It's not like I could have earnt it legitimately anyway. And if they just made money easier to make, I wouldn't have to.

To steal will deprive someone else of property, while you gain it yourself. Downloading the ebooks does not deprive anyone of property. Information, by its very nature, is not scarce once it has been discovered.

Just look how iTunes completely stopped selling anything when they started offering non-copy-protected books - oh wait, they didn't.

While not exactly the same; I checked out Scott Sigler
s [scottsigler.com] podcasts of his own novels (for free on his site), since I listened through all of it (and enjoyed it) I decided to buy his books in hardcover to support him. While I would probably have bought them in an e-book format if I could (as in if I had an e-reader and there was a good e-book service), ordering and buying them through my local store was fine and made me feel all warm and cuddly inside from supporting local businesses that I enjoy frequenting.

The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed "a record year". In fact if you look at the graph above, you'll see that games spend has risen dramatically - from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.

If we assume that there's roughly the same amount of discretionary spending available (which, even allowing for the credit bubble, should be roughly true; most of the credit went into houses), then it's clear who the culprit is: the games industry. By 2009, the amount spent in games and music is almost exactly the same as 1999 (though note that the music industry changed its methods from 2004).

Journalist Motoko Rich quoted Alexie as saying that he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. Alexie called the expensive reading devices "elitist" and said that their widespread adoption would harm both readers from poor communities, as well as the authors themselves. He stated in an interview with Stephen Colbert that "digital books take away jobs" from the artists.[4] He said also in this interview that the culture surrounding books and bookstores is diminishing, and that the digital book phenomenon will only continue to decrease the value of hard copy.

There's really no critique of open source here. He said "open source," but he's just throwing the term around without knowing what "open source culture" is. He clearly means something along the lines of "peer-to-peer" culture.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few authors who misuse FLOSS terms - even those terms that have a very specific meaning - as synonyms of "piracy". For another example, here's a (translated) citation from one fairly popular Russian sci-fi/fantasy writer, Sergey Lukyanenko (the guy who wrote the book on which this movie [imdb.com] is directly based), from his essay on author's rights and Internet:

"The text is stolen? This is the inevitable destiny of any good (and not even necessarily good) book. It will spread through

ebook readers buy more paper books than other readers, and this is a suprise ?

Someone who is willing to spend 200-400 dollars on a e-reader is already a heavy reader, practically by definition. As much as I love my e-reader, there are a bunch of books its not good for - photo books, textbooks (no, A4 pdfs on a Sony e-reader are not a good option.) And for my favourite authors, i'll buy the hardback and get it signed by the author, and then lend to friends.

Gosh... books have been free to read for a very long time. It's called a library. So if authors and publishers are worried about piracy of books why don't they cut libraries off? Gimme a break.
There are many ways to use the digital mediums ease of distribution to make money/protect artistic ownership.
Publishers should consider giving away a very basic digital version of a book, could even make it time sensitive. It would be very cool and very useful to have a world wide public library. Perhaps that

Sounds Familiar, just like when people complain that the publishing industry has become like the movie industry, controlled by a select few.like when people complain that books cost too much. sound familiar,,,,.too many writers are having to turn to self publishing because the publishing industry is trying to play OPEC/MPAA.

when my favorite writers put out a book i buy it. they just don't as often as i'd like and the new writers that are getting fronted i'm not impressed by.

I don't see what open source has to do with it. People, in general, like getting something for nothing. Most people could care less about copyright. If anything, the open source movement educates people about copyright. The first thing people always ask is 'how can this be free?'.

Nor do they have the ability to track your ebook purchases from other websites!

...

But really, your point is moot. Amazon can and only tracks sales from within their own domain, which doesn't make their point "obviously stupid". Their customers buy 3.1 more ebooks on average. They have a shit ton more customers than your used shop or local chains, I would wager. In fact, I doubt most of those shops even sell ebooks. I hope next time you remember that when a website or a chain says, "consumers did this more than this", and you know they can't track from other vendors, it's implied that they mean their own customers.

Open source licenses rely on the same system and are just as taxpayer-funded as "all rights reserved". There's a lot to criticize in his statements, but misleading data (as in the summary) or extremism like yours doesn't serve the cause. We-have-a-right-to-everything-for-free is not going to convince the general public, politicians and courts that copyright reform is necessary. The focus should be limited copyright terms (12 years is what I've read maximizes the public benefit) and strong fair use rules. If we want to get there, defending piracy and ridiculing artists isn't helpful.

They rely on the same system to counter the effects of the system. Without the system they would not need the system.

The focus should be limited copyright terms

Limiting copyright terms is ultimately futile. As long as copyright works as an artificial scarcity it damages the economy, and as long as it's implemented as a privatized taxation for you're basically not going to get it to stick at whatever number of years you want it stuck at. The incentive to increase i

What would you propose as a replacement? See we have an interesting quandary: We like creative works of all sorts. A massive part of our entertainment comes from this and these days we even need it for other things. So we want people to be able to work on "virtual goods" as it were. Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid. So what do you do about that? There is our current system, where we declare virtual goods to work like

1.Information can be copied at virtually no cost.
2.The benefit of an intellectual work is multiplied by the number of people who use it.
3.Creating intellectual works has a cost.

The current system tries to satisfy 3 by limiting 1 in order to make the work behave more like a physical object, so that people will have to pay to get the work. Limiting 1 greatly reduces 2, and has all sorts of collateral damage.

If we leave 1 intact, intellectual works have a far greater benefit to everyone. The challenge is to come up with a way to satisfy 3, without harming 1 and 2. The free-market solution to problems like this is to allow market participants to come up with innovative solutions. Those that solve the problem best stand to make the most profit, so there is incentive.

With the current sub-optimal system in place, there is no incentive to come up with a free-market solution, since the current system is effectively subsidized by taxes, and it even makes it dangerous not to play, due to the possibility of frivolous lawsuit. There is no justification for the current system, because it's been created almost entirely to benefit a small group of people, and it's been done at a cost of everyone's property rights. And no, ideas aren't property. Property is a way of dealing with conflict over scarce resources; if a resource isn't scarce, then everyone can use it without conflict. So it's not that "I have to come up with an alternate", it's that "you have to justify your continued infringement of my property rights".

Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid.

I have bought four guitars, two amps, cables, effect pedals, a saxophone and a clarinet, pooling together summer job wages, birthday gifts, savings of allowances, et cetera. I've been in a recording studio twice; I've performed on the local town square once, and at several events locally. Back when I was a kid (~14-18yo) and didn't have any real money.

Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.

The publishers acted as quality assurance; they did searching and pruning, so we could have the best art. You know what also does that? A moderation system (/.). A review system (amazon). A simple counting mechanism ("most downloaded this day/week/month/year").

None of them are perfect. So aren't the studios. And some artists already choose a life of material poverty in return for wealth in terms of self-expression and self-actualization.

Exactly why is it that the people's need for art can't be satisfied well enough this way? Some amateurs are really good. Oh, so we'll go to the theatre and look at people rather than go to the cinema and look at screens, because making films is rather resource-intensive (i.e. expensive). Or we'll watch more shorts and/or more animated films. Won't we still be entertained?

If I trespass on your property and build something from your materials, I don't own the result, even though it's "my" creation. Buf if I design something, then I can legally prevent you from building that thing out of your own property; in effect, I usurp some of your (and everyone else on the planet's) property rights.

Your main argument seems to be that because someone put a lot of work into something, he is entitled to get money for it. Why did he put a lot of work into something in the first place? Per

"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."

I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.

It's worth noting that grandparent does not criticize artificial scarcity, just calls it what it is in order to contradict the novelist's claim that it is a form of property. Whatever grandparent's opinion on the value of copyright may be, the statement that it is not like physical property under US law is correct.

I rather like copyright, particularly as I'm an aspiring novelist, but I have no illusions that it's a type of property or that my novel should be "mine" forever should I be fortunate enough to

I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.

As a software engineer, I don't. I get paid by the hour or by the project. I couldn't care less what happens with my work afterwards.

Most of my work is on custom internal applications and not things sold on the shelf. You can pirate it all you want

Nobody has the right to profit. If you build a snowman, you can't complain that nobody pays you for it even though it does improve the landscape. You have the right to try to profit, but society has no obligation to bend backwards for you.

I'm a software developer, currently employed. I don't care about the copyright status of what I produce, as I can earn money in any case.

Most programming work isn't of the software sold in shops variety, but of the custom coding for a client kind. It doesn't matter to me how many copies of my work exist, as I don't earn money from royalties, I get it from performing the job I was hired to do (which is for instance improving a program to support X). The clients generally don't have much of a reason

he keeps on using internet for everything. he doesnt object to being linked in forums/content sites using open source scripts for their engine, he doesnt object to using google, which not only uses numerous open source elements to power its operation but also provides open source back to the community, he probably is thrilled when someone gets to buy his books by finding him the through the searches google provides, and many many more.

well, see, mr novelist, apparently you either dont know zit on what you are writing about, or just one of those who want everything self-centric.

if you want to prove otherwise, drop your usage of ANYthing that includes open source. including google, any and all links it provides to your novels/ebooks, any potential traffic/sales you get from forums/sites using phpbb and the similar open source engines. and then lets talk. else, youre just another bastard to us.

The quoted novelist appears to have used an unfortunate choice of words - he probably means "non-respecting-of-intellectual-property culture" rather than "open-source culture". The distinction is obvious to most slashdot readers, but presumably not to this novelist. The quote does not indicate that he has any problems with open-source software, I would imagine that his complaint is more about sites like Pirate Bay than Google.

You know, I'm always. . . impressed. . . by the ability of the 'news' media (and people in general) to turn things around completely ass-backwards. The anecdote that the CNN story leads off with is about the Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol". The book sold millions of copies, but was pirated over a hundred thousand times in the first few days. To me, that says "9 out of 10 People willing to pay for stuff they *could* have downloaded for free". The *real* story, which CNN apparently wishes to ignore, is that the vast majority of people are honest, and wish to pay the authors whose books they like, *instead* of pirating. The *real* story is the pirates are the vast minority of people. Of course, that doesn't generate page views.

As for Sherman Alexie . . . why do I care if he (she?) is terrified? People get terrified about all sorts of irrational things. Many children are terrified of the dark. Why do I care if someone is irrationally terrified of something?

I have to wonder though, about those millions of people who bought "The Lost Symbol"... It would be easy to assume that they did so because they are good and honest people. But it could simply be that 9 out of 10 people don't have any idea where to find pirated digital books, or have access to do so.

In my eyes, the publishing market has always been about convenience. People, in general will pay for something if it is convenient for them to do so. As soon as it becomes more convenient to simply download it o

The people I know and work with in the open source community are probably the most piracy conscious people I know, mostly because of jack holes like this guy. It bugs the hell out of me that people always tie open source and piracy when in fact, there could be nothing further from the truth. I'm the first one to pay for things like GAMES for Linux, or quality e-books because I want people to produce more of them! And honestly, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for your work.

I think ultimately this has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with people wanting something for nothing, and if they can get it, they'll take full advantage. Likely the tie to Open Source comes from the fact that people who are extremely cost conscious are going to prefer Open Source products because they align with their pricing criteria (The same way illegal copies of products align with their pricing criteria)

"Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times."

As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in

I kind of find it funny that they're complaining about text books being pirated. After all they've been charging far too much for them for a very long time, and it's ridiculous since the people they're trying to screw over are students. If your parents aren't rich and paying for everything for you at school, you have to work to pay rent, food, bills and for classes/tuition, and a lot of those students can't get loans if their parents aren't on the up and up, so it's practically criminal that the text books

Novelists can't be trusted. It's always a story with those guys.
Like Al Gore and his triffids, or Michael Crichton's genetic engineering alarmism -- nothing to see here. Pure fabrication.
I'm pretty sure if we want to know the truth about piracy we have to dig really deep into the back part of the Bible...somewhere between Muhammed and the passages about Neo.

Not long ago I wanted to buy an ebook (just published. I went to Amazon and they wanted the hardcover price for the ebook. $25 for an ebook, just plain silly. So I went to barnes&noble, they offered the ebook for $10, similar to a paperback. So I tried to buy it.

Aaaanndd.. an error came up saying that I could not buy this book from the area I was in (not USA). I looked around some more and did not find a european distributor for the ebook. Lot's of companies had the hardcover, but no ebook. I checked if I could order it from amazon (I had no intention of completing that !!$25!! transaction) and same thing. I was not allowed to buy the bloody book.

So I went to my friends at thepiratebay and got the book. I needed to do some conversion to get the text to display properly on my device, but it worked. The legal alternatives, which I tried to follow, simply did not work. Maybe there was a way to get the legal options to work properly, but the way to get customers to do the legal thing is to make that EASIER than the illegal way.On iTunes I am guaranteed to get good quality files, on TPB I am not. Simple.

Here in sweden the streaming service Spotify has changed the game. It's just so easy to do the legal thing that illegal downloading went down. Do the same with movies, books, programs.. basically everything else. Make the legal way the best and easiest way, and people will come.

As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.

Personally I'm just afraid of being locked out of my own collection (losing it overnight as with kindle, unable to transfer to new laptop/reader, unable to copy passages out of it for fair use or search/index it using my software, etc). Now that iTunes and Amazon offer unprotected music it's a great place to shop (I prefer amazon as it doesn't require bloatware in a VM to download, but iTunes often has better bitrate). Thing is that I'm not big on music, and most of what I like is free legally or I already

"I will pay $1 for a book, maybe $2 and that would be severely pushing it. I will not pay $5, $10, $25 for an E-Book. Sorry, but no. There is virtually no cost to distributing an E-Book. There is no paper, ink, shipping, storage, typesetting, etc... there is simply pressing a button to make a copy."

The bulk of the "cost" of the book is not in those things. It's the same model with music and movies. Bestsellers subsidize the failures. And they try to make a large profit.

this currently works best with movies and songs but they need to look at how popular the torrents for a piece of media is and go from there.

Day of release (or sooner) lots of fully working torrents: GreatDay of release a few fully working torrents : very goodweek of release torrents that work : good (but not by much)month of release torrents can be found: not good (real sales will be down badly)if you work at it you may find a couple torrents: Bad (this is box office disaster territory)no torrents : Bad v

" Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."

Whenever I hear something like this, I always feel like there is either a will to mislead or a statistical idiot on the other end. This would be much more impressive a statistic if it were statistically controlled for income.

I think it is a reasonable presumption that Kindle owners are wealthier (or have more wealthier relatives) than the average person. If they have the money to put $ 259 on a Kindl

I'd have said that was one of the main things you kept with Open Source. The Open Source software I've originated has had fairly modest user bases but I've remained the lead developer. The main way I think I'd lose artistic ownership is if somebody took over and developed / maintained the software better than me - in which case they'd deserve it.

Quite upsetting to see open source associated with piracy, etc but I can see how for somebody a) not necessarily as tech-literate as us and b) working closely wit

Artistic "ownership" is an abuse of the term. You can own physical property, such as a painting or book, but you can't "own" an idea or concept, and then morally prevent others from using their own property as they see fit. Intellectual property is a government sanctioned abuse of property rights. Such an innovation must be opposed on principled grounds.

"Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times"

Where do they get these numbers from? Do Rapidshare release download stats? Is there some secret BitTorrent download counter/tracker these people have access to? This has got to be a figure someone has just pulled out of their ass.

Let's be honest here, how many people do you know that really had "that idea" of IP ownership? How many talk about "licensing" Windows and how many "buy" it? How many "license" a book and how many "buy" it?

And that set in with the open source movement? My dad, who can't tell a toaster from a netbook and would think of a medical condition hearing about "open sores", is the proud "owner" of a very extensive dead tree library. And it's his firm belief that he "owns" those books, the idea that these books don't belong to him never crossed his mind.

So let's be sensible here. The idea of intellectual property never made it into public conscience. And until recently that was very much in the interest of the same people that now bemoan it.

Unfortunately the average person has very little idea what the term "open source" actually means. It's a technical term that's vague to them. These are the kind of people who probably also aren't clear on the term "operating system," etc.

I've seen both positive and negative misinterpretations flying around. The usage in TFA seems to be open source == piracy, or maybe open source == free as in beer. If you really parse the quote from the article in terms of the actual meaning of "open source," it doesn't make any sense. Actual quote: "With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." Meaning: "People on the internet are used to being able to see the original programming instructions used to create their software, and with that culture, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." It obviously doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't make sense when you consider that open-source licenses like BSD and GPL can only be enforced because the original authors own the copyright.

There are also people who see "open-source" as a feel-good term, like "green," and they apply it inappropriately because they want some of that goodness to rub off on them. For instance, I went to a symposium in August here in California where the results of Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative were announced. Participants included open-source types from Curriki, CK-12, and Connexions, as well as teachers, politicians, IT folks, hardware vendors, and textbook publishers. The only traditional publisher that submitted any books to the initiative was Pearson, and all they submitted was a consumable workbook, not actual textbooks. Pearson's rep referred to its workbook as "free and open-source," but in fact the workbook is not open source in any sense. (It's distributed in a non-editable format, and it's not distributed under an open-source license.)

It's unfortunate that we haven't ended up with terminology that's more understandable to the average person. We had people like RMS advocating the term "free software," and others like Eric Raymond pushing for "open source." This had to do with an ideological agreement within the free software/OSS movement. The problem is that neither term is easy for outsiders to understand. "Free software" simply implies free as in beer to most people. They equate it to "freeware," i.e., low-quality, closed-source Windows software that you download from someone's Geocities page as a.exe file. "Open source" isn't understandable to most people, because they don't understand the distinction between source code and executable code.

Alexie is a Native American. Those people have no sense of ownership anyway. Their tribes roam from book to book. It wasn't until the white man arrived with his culture of printing out books and putting his name on them and getting all upset if the Indians took them off the shelf and didn't return them within two weeks that the trouble started.

There's an article [latimes.com] up at the LA Times about Peter Drucker. If you don't know, Druker was an economist who said things like:

The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.

As pointed out above by noidentity and others, people who have risen in the economic hierarchy thanks to institutions built by the people for the people owe their success to society's edifices as much as themselves. Sure someone may be a talented corporate cost-cutter with the nickname "Chainsaw" or a writer nobody has ever heard of, but they would be flipping burgers if it wasn't for the artificial man-made constructs of incorporation and copyright.

There's an implicit Ann Rand-ian quality to Alexie's thinking: progress for all depends on the special qualities of a few geniuses who naturally deserve the good life. Putting aside the fact that most admirers of Rand ignore that her elite characters all had a social conscience and gave back, few people who claim to be rainmakers stop to consider where they got the water that makes the rain.

But that's all background really, the issue that Alexie is talking about is the economic value of what he does. That value is assigned by society and I think it's fair to say that the generation growing up doesn't see as much value in it as he does. And they may have a point. Upsetting as it may be to artists, would the world fall apart if it was even harder to make a living doing what they do? Did Avatar give us free electricity? Feed Africa?

The artistic community might also want to ask itself if copyright had not been extended to ridiculous lengths and more books that people actually want to read were in the public domain, would that have prevented a lot of piracy? Experience has shown that where legal alternatives exist for people to get what they want they will chose those alternatives. I don't think too many people explicitly know how many works they have been denied by copyright reform but I think they can sense it.

The conflict we have now exists because this generation's instincts clash with the status quo. It remains to be seen whether or not the interests represented by Rupert Murdoch`s media machine can keep the lid on things.

Neil Gaiman has spoken at various times (e.g. Neil Gaiman at Open Rights Group [openrightsgroup.org]) about the fact that most of his readers found him free, then started to buy his books. Cory Doctorow summarizes this beautifully in the foreword to Little Brother (freely downloadable from Cory's Site [craphound.com], read the section "The Copyright Thing."

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Baen with Webscriptions and its Free Library has been making e-books in multiple formats available for years. They've found that after an author puts a few books into the Free Library the sales of that author's backlist (including the freely-available books) rise. I suspect that they get more sales & readers for Webscriptions as well - if I can buy individual ebooks for $6 or the entire set of releases for the month (up to 4 "frontlist" new publications plus some backlist) for $15, I might as well cough up the couple of extra books and see which writers I like.